1 Boring Old Man

After a week of the Washington Post‘s series about Vice President Cheney, I guess I thought we’d about hit the bottom of a story. Then I read The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming in Rolling Stone Magazine. For the last several years, I’ve followed the news, combing it for evidence of what I suspected – that this Administration was different from any other in my lifetime. That’s just the way it felt to me. I found the blogs and was heartened to discover a lot of other people who were doing the same thing – people who felt it too. One of the complaints was that the stories that confirmed these suspicions rarely made it to the "fourth establishment" – the Main Stream Media – and when they did, they didn’t stay there very long.

I guess I’m a Liberal. What that means formally is that I don’t believe in absolute truth. There’s no "right" way to do things, no bottom line principle that can’t be revised. In an argument, I might state my opinion as forcefully as any other person, but internally, I don’t believe that opinion is "true." It’s just what I think. So when I write these blog posts, they’re written as if I’m fighting for a belief. More accurately, I’m arguing with the absolutism of the argument someone else is making. I can’t help it. I’m just a self doubter, a Skeptic. The founder of Scepticism, Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 B.C.), was Alexander the Great’s court philosopher. It’s interesting that most of what is known about him isn’t true – it’s the jokes contemporaries made about him. They were called Dogmatists. Back then that wasn’t a bad thing – it meant "truth-seeker." Pyrrho was a truthseeker too, he just didn’t think it could ever be found. He believed in "relative truth." That’s what I think too. So when I read or write about Cheney and Rove, about this Administration, there’s always doubt. Am I just a "reflex Liberal" like they would say if they knew me? It’s a funny thought, because they talk about Liberals as if we believed something particular. That’s not really true. I [we] don’t "believe" in "believing in."

But when I read the Washington Post series, or the even more disturbing Rolling Stone article, I think we’re close enough to the truth to act. A famous Liberal, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote a tract, The Social Contract. It was an influence in the framing of our Constitution.

-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

-That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

And why am I thinking revolution this morning? I just read  The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming in Rolling Stone Magazine. Read it, and then let’s all get dressed up like Indians an go brew some tea into the Boston Harbor.